Most things come easily to me, things you wouldn't expect from a boy with no discernible talent. Things like baseball, calculus, forgiveness never came easy to me, but love did. Love in the carnal sense, love in the fictional sense. Love in the sense of letting go, love in the sense of finding yourself. Love in the sense of that ever-present gnaw at the pit of your stomach that registers in the mind as I am responsible for someone else's happiness.
Love has come easily to me since birth. I love my mother in an almost manic sense, an almost Oedipal obsession with my desire to make her smile. In kindergarten, I kissed a girl named Alex's hand when she reached out to grab a colored pencil, I thought I was gentlemanly and adult of me. Years of expansive love bloomed in me as I began to daydream of boyfriends and how exotic the word fiancé sounded, with it's accented e and promise of a future with someone else. With each boyfriend, there was a breakup, and with each breakup, there was some promise of next time, next time, next time. I found Nolan during one of those next times. During my return to Italy, when we were both a little bruised, both a little cut up and the vinegar kisses of a stranger felt like when soap gets in a hangnail. But, underneath all of that, once we stripped down and opened up, there was love.

It was raw and passionate, it left me heady in the perfumed 10x8 dorm room where the heat was on and a blizzard blew through Pittsburgh one night in January.

It was lazy, falling asleep with a bucket of chicken during XLV.

It was chaotic in the sense of never having an ending, never knowing the dates of anything important, throwing shoes and his grandmother's dishes when I got too angry and forgot to say, "I'm sorry."

But I was never sorry, never sorry for loving someone so ferociously and tender. I'd lick the wounds I had created and then blame the rust-taste in my wolf mouth on his laziness, his determination to let our love fade away. It was raw and passionate, it was lazy and chaotic. And somehow love became this little succulent, never needing watered, collecting dust on the windowsill, timid in its approach to life. Our love had a geophyte approach to sustainability, fatty and tuberous, holding onto any love that existed when life got barren and dry. When it got hard to come by, when it couldn't be found in the moonlight nor with a dowsing rod, broken off from a backyard apple tree when the Santa Anas made us unbearable to one another.

Since I left for Texas, we fell in love again--hard and fast, when the bones were most brittle. An apologetic love where conversations often ended in "How did it get like this?" We are finding our way back to the frenzied love of when I was 19, and slowly those sour wounds heal when they're exposed to air. I wanted to celebrate this love for Valentine's Day and forget all the other four years and the bullshit we put one another through. I wanted to celebrate this love in boxes, small tins of love that overpowered Nolan for Valentine's Day. I wanted to remind him what home could feel like. I wanted to remind him what love could feel like, because our house in San Diego was big by San Diego standards, and it could creak too loud when you're lonely. I made him dinner, cakes and bread, and shipped it to him to have for Valentine's Day with a movie, so it felt like a date tonight.

I love you.

“He shall never know I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same.”

Roasted Beet Pasta

Ingredients:

2 large-sized beets

3 whole eggs + 1 egg yolk

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon lemon zest (optional)

6+ cups flour

Directions:

Preheat oven to 450

While oven is preheating, peel beets and wrap in foil, place on baking tray. When oven is ready, roast for 40 minutes.

Remove from oven and allow to cool for a few minutes, unwrapping so steam can release

Cut into large chunks.

In a large food processor (6 cups or more), throw in beets, eggs and yolk, olive oil, and salt (and optional zest). Puree until smooth

In a stand mixer, combine puree and three cups of flour using the paddle attachment. When dough begins to form, switch to dough hook and continue to mix, adding in last three cups of flour, one at a time, until a proper dough forms

Remove from bowl onto a floured work surface (i prefer marble for pasta-making) and knead for 7 minutes or until is elastic

Keeping dough floured, cut into eighths and lay plastic wrap on sections you are not going to use.

Put on a plate lined with paper towels and allow to cool, blotting excess grease

In a food processor, combine all ingredients and pulse until combined. Do not over-pulse, as it can result in fats in bacon to liquify.

Enjoy over popcorn, with potatoes, or be creative!

Handcrafted Candy Bars

There is no real recipe for a basic candy bar. I used some of my mother's recipes, which use more specialized chocolate and techniques, but the instructions I have below can be practiced even with chocolate chips. From here, you can personalize them and make them your own, even including honeys, spices, herbs, salts, and even homemade nut butters! But, I would start here for an intro into confectionery.

Before you begin, use a ratio of 3 oz per candy bar, so you have some room for leeway with sticking to the bowl, the mold, and your spatula. From here, you can cut and halve, mix chocolates together and multiply easily. I particularly like mixing white chocolate and a milkier, lighter chocolate. When you have decided how you would like to flavor your chocolate, measure out how much you will need. Then, take away about 30% of that amount and set aside (this will be your "seed chocolate", a step for this pseudo-tempering. It is necessary so your chocolate doesn't turn grey when cooled).

Prepare any mold you may be using. I always use a light olive oil cooking spray and then wipe off the excess with a paper towel.

In a microwave-safe bowl, combine your remaining chocolates and microwave on HIGH for 20 seconds. Take out and stir. Put back in for another 20 seconds and repeat this process until all chocolate is silky smooth and easy to stir.

Add remaining chocolate and continue to stir. The heat from the melted chocolate should melt remaining chocolate.

Add any add-ins and pour into mold and smooth out with a rubber spatula. Allow to cool for at least half an hour in the fridge before unmolding. Package however you want (I went a little far with homemade packaging I designed and printed on special paper, but basic foil will do). Store in a cool place, or the fridge.

I've gotten used to microwaving water for tea and never having to tell a single person what I'm thinking. I slept for fifteen hours yesterday, my body exhausted from the flu, and no one would ever have known if I didn't tell people. For pity, for a connection to someone else. I've become this different person, a liminal character between two worlds--the moorish memories of California, the Shangri-La future of central Texas. If the sun hits me at noon, my fingertips become smoke rings, I float away into my own imagination. I never have to tell a single person what I'm thinking.
Last week, I stopped by a Salvation Army and looked for an ice cream scoop. I wanted an old one, one that looked rustic and used. One that survived birthday parties and anniversaries, graduation parties and the Y2K scare. I found a chipped crock and an Ace of Base CD instead. I forgot my wallet in the car and felt oddly embarrassed, oddly unsure of myself, self-conscious of my windowshopping. I went back out to the car and noticed how few parking spots there were for how many customers the store had. It confused me, how people got there. I left without buying anything.

The reason I needed the ice cream scoop is because I was determined to make ice cream. Chantilly Meringuèe, to be exact. I was given twenty-two eggs from a coworker whose fridge was overflowing with them. So many delicate egg whites, cracked open on the sides of mixing bowls and countertops. My fascination with the egg white's transformation was last seen with the Italian Meringue Buttercream, but I wanted to take it one step further. Because, egg whites, too, are so liminal. So between-worlds. Too viscous for liquid, too amorphous for a solid. The more air you incorporate, the more velveteen and shapely it becomes.

I wanted to see this transformation, I wanted to feel as though my sublimated body could border-cross the way this dessert did. I wanted to create magic without the unnecessary equipment of an ice cream maker. I wanted something cold on my tongue, the sharp bite of winter melting in my mouth. I wanted to feel alive this week, after sleeping for fifteen hours and only speaking when I needed something. I wanted to feel like a kid again, taking change from my pocket and buying ice cream across the street from my school, at a place called Shaffer's Snack Shack. I wanted to share this recipe with you.

I was five when I told my first lie. We lived in Kentucky then. In a little ranch house with not enough room. My sister slept in the laundry room, her bed was by the washer. The house had one big tree in the backyard, broken bricks in a corner of the lot. The fence on the left was overrun by blackberry bramble. My sister and I would see who could fit the most in our mouths, the juices running down our chins like well-fed wolves.
In that house, I told my first lie. I told my mother I was sick, that I couldn't get out of bed, that I couldn't move. She said I looked pale and I held her hand while we watched a movie on the bottom bunk of a bed I shared with my brother. My mother had long hair then, thick and that kind of black hair that turns blue in the right light. She was 29 then and worked in a warehouse for produce and generic-brand food. Her whole life was over by then, I think. She was never really her own person by the time I came along. But she sat on the bed with me and we watched movies. I lied to her and we both took a nap together.

In that same house, that small little house in Kentucky, with the vinyl siding and it's creaky front door, a tornado hit and my 29-year-old mom drove home to protect us. She drove a green pickup truck. She tied a sun-bleached red bandana on the mirror the day she got it. It was a summer then, hot on the skin and the heat broke the sky. She put that same mattress we fell asleep on over our heads and we watched as a tree branch smacked the window pane, leaving a scratch that was still there when we left two months later.

I haven't stopped lying since I was five. I do it every day. I do it over small things, like if I put cream in my coffee. I do it about big things, like when I tell people I love them. I do it as a way to get attention, as a way to hold someone's hand. I do it for pity and for protection. I do it for fun. I lie to my mother more than anyone else. I tell her I forgive her for everything, for the missed birthdays and the time she hung up the phone on me when I called her from Italy, drunk and alone and only had ten minutes left on the pay phone, only a few cents left in my pocket. I lie to her to make it easy, because I remember how she sat on the bed and held my hand and loved me even when I was lying to her.

Every time I was sick after that day, she'd stay home with me and watch a movie. She'd take my temperature with her hand flat on my forehead and at night she'd have my dad carry me to my room. We had tradition, we had rituals. We had moments that I haven't been able to share with anyone else. I lied to her over and over again for seventeen years now, but every time I call her and tell her I'm sick, she always remembers this day, too.

Last week, I called her and told her the mountain cedar was blowing. I told her that my eyes itched and how I didn't want to go to work. She told me about her chicken soup with big noodles and roasted chicken. Carrots and celery and oil. She told me who I used to eat it and ask for seconds and thirds. She told me how she wished she could be here now, in my kitchen in Texas, making it for me. I lied to her again and said, "Yeah, me too."

Instead, I did it myself, like so many things these days. This soup is an apology, a memory, a souvenir from when we all played sick and tried to get out of school with the flu. It's a revisionist tale of how life should have gone. It's to my mother who was 25 and young when she had me. It's to a little boy who still has family in Kentucky he's never met. It's to the 1,500 miles in any direction to the closest people I love. It's a warm soup, a comforting soup. It's a soup you eat when the tornado heat breaks and you have three small children to stop crying. It's the soup you reheat when the dollar has to stretch because you're saving up to move out of a house where your daughter sleeps in the laundry room. It's a soup for a home, not for a house.

Chicken Noodle Soup

Ingredients:

2 large chicken breasts, defrosted

3 sprigs rosemary, divided

2 lemons, cut into wedges

2 tablespoons butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

3 carrots, diced

3 stalks celery, diced

1 large yellow onion, diced

1 head of garlic, minced

96 oz chicken stock (as always, preferably homemade, but there is a lot of flavor in the soup for store-bought)

1 1/2 tablespoon chicken base (found in supermarkets)

1/2 tablespoon lemon pepper

1 tablespoon pepper

16 oz egg noodles, cooked separately in another pot

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 450

Rip two aluminum sheets off big enough to wrap your chicken in. Place chicken breasts on respective foils and rub salt, pepper, and olive oil all over. Add four lemon wedges per chicken breast and rosemary. Wrap tightly. Bake on sheet for 25 minutes or until cooked through.

Set chicken aside to cool.

Begin on the mirepoix. In a large dutch oven, heat butter and oil over medium-high heat. Before butter burns and when oil is almost smoking, add carrots, celery, and onion. Cook down 10-15 minutes and stir occasionally, until vegetables are tender and onions are translucent

Add garlic and remaining sprig of rosemary (diced finely). Cook only for a minute to release some flavors and not burn, stirring constantly.

Pour in chicken stock. Allow to heat through and bring to a low boil for five minutes. While waiting on that, tear the cooled chicken breasts into bite-sized chunks with your hands or a fork.

Add the chicken base, pepper, and lemon pepper. Stir thoroughly to ensure that the seasonings have incorporated into the soup

Add the shredded chicken

Cover and let simmer on low while you prepare the egg noodles in a separate pot (follow package instructions here, but add a little bit of chicken stock to the liquid for some added flavor)

Drain noodles and add to soup. Simmer to warm noodles up.

Serve with Laura Calder's Miracle Boule and have for the rest of the week

It was hard to find a comfortable position. I'm long-limbed and can never stay still for long. I wrapped my body around an old leather jacket and road the north-bound Greyhound bus to Dallas last week. It gave me a reason to see Nolan, the first time in three weeks. Three weeks that quantified into a lifetime of changing perspectives and the resultant, nagging question of why did i do this?

The bus left at seven and pulled in by midnight. We sat in traffic for 45 minutes, and I read articles about the I Ching and cancer. My eyes grew dryer with every mile marker and I had a pair of glasses tucked into the backseat pocket. It was longer than I thought five hours could be, and the only way I could gauge that kind of time was San Diego to Phoenix, from San Diego to Las Vegas, from San Diego to the first gas station we stopped at the buy water and a burger on our way to El Paso for the night. All my starting points were from that Southern California town. And many of my ending points, too.

By the end of my time in California, I was no longer many things. I was no longer alone, no longer exciting, no longer young and naive and studious. No longer a law student, no longer confident, no longer the faltering idea of being someone else. I was myself and I have sacrificed for that kind of beginning, but I had to go to Dallas and see if it was all worth it. To look the wolf in the eyes at night and see if it howls the same as you howled inside. When it wasn't so perfect, when it was a shaggy puddle of old love notes that got ripped to shreds in an old cardboard box.

We met at the station and a male prostitute asked where I was going. It was pitch-dark and silent in the city, and in the distance you saw how expansive Dallas was. We passed office buildings that still had lights on and it seemed we found ourselves in another city, another few moments of exploration. We got a hotel for the night, a little room with a queen-sized bed and a TV that was screwed into the dresser. The fridge motor ran louder than my breathing and my body, naturally nestled into Nolan's, fell into the rhythm of his breathing.

And for two days, I felt whole. In a way I hadn't before. Longer than the three-week span of living on my own. Longer than maybe a year or two. It was no longer a question of "How will we survive?", but a question of when will the vast gap between us close itself? Inside you can fill barbecue joints, the Grand Canyon, and the biggest little city in the world. There is a five year age gap and the gaps in our teeth and a gap between my thighs because I'm only eating for one. There are memories I think I forgot and a tenderness in our words and fingertips that came out of the synapses of our mind, our fight or flight response, our relationship survivalism.

And we couldn't even kiss goodbye because we're in an unfamiliar town. We hesitated, standing at terminal five of the Dallas greyhound, my bag on my shoulder and a headphone in one year. I looked him in the eye and said, "I'll see you soon."

I still have the same dream as when I was fourteen. I'm flying in a plane and it is raining outside, I stare lazily like a cat. We're heading to Nova Scotia and it sounds magical and foreign and we never land. Always in the air, always anticipating something you've heard before, but can't pinpoint exactly where. It's a silly dream, pointless. I am not sure what to make of it other than those two words. I think the same thing when my mother tells me what she got at the grocery store. I think the same thing when I tell Nolan what I did the day before, rehearsing the call before I make it in my head. Always mundane, always ordinary, just to hear myself. And maybe my subconscious is doing the same--just wanted to think, to be remembered its there, waiting, powerless during the day. And when I think like that, about what my mind wants me to know, how I may have forgotten a part of who I am, I'll wake up, a little damp with sweat, and check the time on my phone. Sometimes it's witching hour, sometimes it's ten in the morning. Sometimes it doesn't matter, because before I can even set my phone down, I'm asleep again, dreaming of that first bite of cold mug on cold lips, and how the warm coffee cuts into that bitter cold with its own brand of percolated bitterness. And then I wake up, ready for breakfast. I've forgotten anything I dreamt about. And my subconscious remains in that liminal space of wandering and wondering, of ghost of myself, cutting itself, pleading to Heathcliff to let it in, let it in.
And I wake up hungry, so hungry. This week you can see indents below my cheekbones; I haven't done a lot of eating lately. Too tired at night, to busy during the day. Too lazy to make myself even a bowl of cereal. Not concerned enough of my own well-being when I don't have anyone to live with to remind me to do the menial tasks of eating, sleeping, calming down before the blow-up and the breakdown. And I've been sick with a cough that won't go away, my throat a little raw, my voice a little rough on the vowels. I've drank more tea this week than I have in years.

And one morning when I was feeling particularly hungry, particularly awake, I made bread. A simple bread, a quick bread. An Irish soda bread. Simple, almost more cake than bread, it chewed easily and satisfied my empty stomach, my thoughts of an empty bed and an empty life. I've written before about the transformative power of bread, and when I pulled the loaves out of the oven, nothing mattered but that first bite. Not my mind, my cold, my job, or my relationship--just the warm and delicate crumb that fell over my flannel shirt as I stood hunched over the stove, eating it tenderly with my bare hands.

Preheat oven to 325 and prepare two 9"x5" loaf pans with parchment paper and butter or oil.

Sift the flour, baking powder, soda, sugar, and salt together a few times. I like to do this to ensure they are all mixed, but also to give it a lighter texture for a quick bread like this, that can sometimes be dense with moisture

In a small saucepan, melt butter and set aside to cool briefly

In a measuring cup, measure out buttermilk. Add egg and cooled melted butter. Whisk together until all a pale yellow.

With a rubber spatula or wooden spoon, create a well in the dry ingredients. Slowly begin pouring in wet ingredients, making sure all dry is moistened and a dough/batter begins to form

Distribute evenly into prepared loaf pans and bake for 70 minutes or until golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean.

Allow to cool a little, and enjoy with caramelized onion butter!

Ingredients for the Onion Butter

1/2 a stick of butter, room temperature

2 tablespoons olive oil or butter, for onions

1/2 one yellow onion, chopped

Pinch of sea salt

Directions:

In a small skillet, melt 2 tablespoons of butter or heat olive oil on medium-low heat

Add onion and let cook down for 15-20 minutes, stirring constantly

Set aside and allow to cool

In a food processor, mix room temperature butter and onions, occasionally scraping sides and bottom with a rubber spatula to ensure homogeneously mixed.

Lay out plastic wrap on a flat surface, and use spatula to scoop mixture into center. Shape roughly into a log and then roll plastic wrap around butter, twisting the edges like candy to create a firm log shape. Allow to firm up in fridge before serving.